Amazon’s decision to block Australian consumers from its main site, refuse to ship to Australia and force us to use a pitiful local site is an act of contempt by a global tech giant that can do what it likes, confident in its remarkable sharemarket position. But it’s also on Australia’s governing class and gouging retail oligopolists who prompted it.

The new GST arrangements on foreign purchases, commencing in a month’s time, are bipartisan and the result of pleading by special interests — local retailer oligopolies who hate the idea of Australians being able to avoid the outrageous mark-ups they slap on products that are available overseas, and state governments who saw an opportunity to suck more from the community via the GST.

The arguments that this is about a “level playing field” — long peddled by the retail oligopoly and politicians — or about multinational tax evasion — a line pushed by Scott Morrison — are rubbish. The Australian government has no more fiscal claim to what Australians spend overseas online than it does to what they spend overseas when they travel. And it’s not Amazon — which is indeed a vast international tax dodger — that is not paying GST, it’s consumers. The government wants Amazon to collect the tax from Australians, not pay the tax itself.

The result is an amalgam of everything wrong with our political and economic environment, albeit in a kind of #fistworldproblems way. The sordid way special interests and high-profile business people like Gerry Harvey influence government policy at the expense of consumers. The way governments conspire to punish consumers. And the visible contempt of a multinational tech company for consumers.

What to do? From July 1, Australians can shop internationally at Amazon if they’re prepared to pay more to have US shipper collect and forward on their physical products. Choice has a recent guide to those companies here.

The additional cost, however, might be enough to render offshore purchases uneconomic compared to local mark-ups. And accessing Amazon’s international site will only be possible if you have a Virtual Private Network to mask your Australian IP address (you should have one of those no matter what you do online). 

Crikey provided a guide to VPNs three years ago, and other sites have provided updated guides — the rule of thumb is to just not use free VPNs, they’re worth what you pay for them.